Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I cannot support this amendment. This involves €750 million of taxpayers' money. It is not the same as private commercial investments and there has to be a mechanism to allow Members of the Oireachtas or members of the public to properly scrutinise it. Increasingly in the housing funding area we are seeing exclusions of this kind, either in practice or in legislation.

For example, decisions on the Rebuilding Ireland home loan scheme, which is a product that has merit and is not one for which I have criticised the Government, are based on a credit policy that has been designed by the Department or the Housing Finance Agency yet we are not able to get access to that credit policy, even in some redacted form, where we want to ensure that refusals under the scheme have been done in accordance with the rules. This is a real problem because it is a publicly funded scheme and we want to ensure consistency across local authorities. We are now having the same problem with the increasing use of public private partnerships in the delivery of social housing. The Chairman has raised this in other areas, but again, when public private partnerships for social housing are now developed, they are developed on the basis of benchmarking exercises developed by the Department. This is locked in secrets, however, and we as Members of the Oireachtas have no ability to assess whether there is value for money for the taxpayer. The level of exclusions is very worrying to me. Given the scale of the investment - and I know it is a commercial investment with a commercial return - if something goes wrong in this scheme, a committee, whether the Committee of Public Accounts or this committee, could come back in a year or two wanting to know what went wrong. These exclusions prevent us from doing that. I am not saying all exclusions would be unnecessary, but the breadth of these exclusions is very worrying, and I certainly could not accept them.